


Comes to a Crossroads

by Daisiestdaisy (Doyle)



Category: Gotham (TV)
Genre: Fix-It, M/M, Mention of canon-typical violence, Pining, post-3.06
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-10-28
Updated: 2016-10-28
Packaged: 2018-08-27 13:15:25
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,145
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8403070
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Doyle/pseuds/Daisiestdaisy
Summary: Post-episode for 3.06. Ed calls to take a rain check on dinner. Oswald decides not to let that stand.





	

**Author's Note:**

> When I wrote this it wasn't explicit in the show yet that Ed actually lived at the mansion, so this has him still with his s2 apartment.

 “Later, you could cash me in at the riverbank: what am I?”

Well, good to know that Ed hadn’t, in fact, been kidnapped by one of their enemies on his way to dinner. Oswald switched the phone to his other ear and pushed aside the hitlist he’d been frantically scrawling on the back of some mayoral paperwork, Butch’s name circled and underlined at the top. “What?”

“What, you want me to repeat the riddle, or what, what’s the answer?” Ed was talking fast, something downright giddy in his voice, and Oswald was fascinated to discover it was possible to feel irritated and adoring all at the same time. He’d only known he was in love for a day, but he’d already learned so much. “Later, you could cash...”

“Where are you?” Oswald interrupted. “Why aren’t you here?”

“It’s a rain check. I need a rain check on dinner. My apologies. Something incredible happened to me while I was picking up the wine.”

Oswald’s side of the call, after that, was very limited, not much more than “really” and “yes” and “I see”. Somewhere in there, in the middle of Ed’s excited story about the woman who looked _exactly_ like that girlfriend he’d killed, but blonde and alive and with an implausible fondness for riddles (“she came up with the rain check one, actually! Can you believe that?”), he found himself agreeing that it was fine, of course, they could have dinner some other time.

It turned out it wasn’t easy to make polite conversation while being impaled through the heart.

Oswald hung up the phone, and then he crossed out Butch’s name on his piece of paper and added ‘ISABELLA __?’ at the top. The point of the pen ripped through the page, and once that had happened it seemed like the only thing to do was to tear it apart, over and over, until it was a pile of confetti beside the untouched feast.

The mansion, at least, had a well-stocked wine cellar. That was a relief until the moment, halfway through the bottle, when he realized that if he’d just told Ed not to bother about the wine because he had plenty at home then he would never have met _her_.

**

“You’re still beautiful, Mother.”

It was nice to have her back with him, even like this: stone, headless, stashed at the bottom of the cellar stairs until the damage done by Butch’s faux Red Hood thugs could be undone.

“Ed says getting you repaired is a priority,” he told her. Sitting here beside her statue was like being a small child again, safe and uncomplicated, before he’d loved anyone else. “He promised, and I still trust him to keep his promises, even after he abandoned me for some woman he picked up in a liquor store. Isn’t that funny?” He leaned to rest his forehead against the cool stone of her knees.

“You never told me how badly being in love would hurt. I know you knew. This must have been how you felt when Father’s parents sent you away.” He dragged his sleeve across his damp eyes; the coat was his father’s, salvaged from one of the trunks Grace and her awful children had tossed into the attic and which Olga had dragged downstairs again on his orders, grumbling complaints he hadn’t understood or cared about. He’d worn it for dinner like a talisman, thinking only that his father had known one real, true love in his all-too-short lifetime, and not considering that that love had been snatched away almost at once.

Maybe his parents were together again now. Oswald believed in ghosts, and there were times late at night in this house when he would turn his head and swear that for an instant he saw Sasha or Charles glaring there in his peripheral vision, but he’d never sensed his father’s spirit here. He and Mother were long gone. It was just Oswald alone, now.

“I wish you could have met Ed, Mother. You’d like him. You would.” Although how she’d feel about the ‘him’ part was up for debate. Then again, now that he came to think on it, she’d only ever talked about love as some abstract thing, not attached to a _she_ or _her_. “He’s smart – brilliant, and I’m even coming to like the riddles and the little word games – and he’s so, so handsome, and kind...” He swallowed a mouthful of wine directly from the neck of the bottle and thought about this. “Well, he’s kind to _me_. He would do anything for me. His exact words. And, anyway, he’s killed far fewer people than I have, so.” Three, he’d once boasted. Adorable, that he’d actually been proud of that. Oswald had murdered that many people just in this house.

“I love him,” he said, so he could tell himself that wherever his mother was now, she knew he had love in his life: secret, and unreturned, but maybe it counted for something, even so. “I love him,” he said again, to himself, and hearing it aloud made him feel, if not brave, then at least capable of bravery at some point in the future. Or that might have been the wine.

Either way, he used his cane to lever himself painfully off the stairs, leaned in to kiss his mother’s forehead, remembered at the last moment why that wasn’t going to work, settled for patting her shoulder instead, and went to look for Olga.

**

Some unknown time later Oswald rubbed his eyes, blinking up at the light and at Ed haloed against it, leaning over him, his friend’s cold expression melting into delight as he registered who he’d found on his bed. “Oswald!”

“Hello, friend,” he croaked, sitting up against the headboard. He didn’t remember falling asleep, but the apartment had been empty, and in the absence of a couch the bed had seemed as good a place as any to wait, and he could fill in the blanks from there.

“You broke my lock.”

“I tried to pick it.” He shrugged an apology. “I lost patience. I may have also broken one of your clocks. It was striking midnight when I made it through the door. Too many cuckoos.” It hadn’t just been the noise. The very existence of cuckoos – parasites who tricked doting parent-birds into wasting their love on these interlopers to the nest – had just suddenly enraged him. “I’ll pay to have it repaired,” he said.

Ed sat down on the edge of the bed, the overhead light glinting off the metallic edge of what Oswald guessed was a switchblade as he closed it and slid it into his pocket. “I should get you a key.”

A few hours ago that would have sent Oswald’s heart soaring. Now he just wondered, sourly, whether Isabella was hiding in the kitchen while they talked.

Ed commented, “There’s an empty taxi cab outside.”

“My housekeeper wouldn’t give me a ride. And it seems that some of the good people of Gotham are decidedly unpatriotic with regards to providing free transportation to prominent citizens who left their wallets at home.”

“Blood on the steering wheel, but not a lot,” Ed said. “No body, and even if you could’ve moved it alone, you wouldn’t have left the car. Don’t worry. I took down the cab number; I’ll call in on the driver in the morning, make sure he doesn’t spread any false stories about being threatened by the mayor.”

“Thank you.” _See, Mother, I told you he was kind to me_.

Ed was looking at him, as if waiting for something.

“You’re probably wondering why I’m here,” Oswald stalled. “Well. I.”

“You had something you wanted to tell me,” Ed prompted. “In a more private setting. This is private.”

“Oh, it is? So your new lady-friend –”

“Isabella.”

“I remember her name,” Oswald said, careful not to snap the words out, to keep a pleasant, friendly smile on his face. “She didn’t come home with you. That’s too bad.”

“Not really. Very excited to see how things develop.”

“Yes, so you said on the phone.”

“She looks _exactly_ like Ms Kringle.”

“You said that too. Several times.”

“Not just similar, identical. In every detail.” He shook his head, a look of wonder on his face. “You don’t know what it is, Oswald, to be suddenly face to face with the person you loved -”

“Who you killed,” he broke in, unable to stand it any longer.

“Accidentally killed.”

“Mm. But deliberately dismembered.”

“Technically you have to remove an actual limb to count as dismemberment, not just a hand,” Ed said. “And more than one. Fun fact.”

“That _is_ fun.”

“And that wasn’t really me, not me-me. I was different back then.”

“So in a way this Isabella is like a second chance,” Oswald said tightly. “She even likes riddles. Doesn’t something about this seem a little too convenient, Ed?”

Ed said, as if it was the most obvious thing in the world: “Yes, of course. She’s a trap.”

It was like throwing something – a knife, say – blindfolded and with one arm tied behind your back, and hitting a bullseye you hadn’t even known was there. He hadn’t actually meant that “too convenient”. Ed meeting the woman of his dreams, a Ms Kringle doppelganger, no less, just at the moment when he might be on the cusp of something with Oswald was so badly timed, so unfair, that somehow Oswald hadn’t considered it might not be an accident. He’d accepted, without questioning, that this was just the kind of ignominy the universe loved to throw at him.

But Ed was right. He was right. _There, Mother, I said he was brilliant, too._ Of _course_ she was a trap.

“But who sent her?” Ed was saying. “Was it about me, or are they using me to get to you? Gilzean would be my prime suspect, but this seems too sophisticated for him, way beyond dressing some guns-for-hire like the Red Hoods. I thought at first she might actually _be_ Kristen, brought back like Mooney and the rest of Strange’s monsters, but I talked to her for hours, pretending I was infatuated with her, and she never slipped up once...”

 _Pretending._ “That’s where you were.”

“Oh, I didn’t want to let her out of my sight. I even pretended not to notice her eavesdropping on my phone call.” Ed grinned. “Did I sound convincing?”

“I believed it,” he said helplessly.

“And after she left the bar, I followed her, but she doubled back on herself and I lost her near the Narrows. So I called, said I was desperate to see her again, and made a lunch date for tomorrow.”

Oswald was very glad he hadn’t opened with that part.

“It’s exhilarating, isn’t it? Having a mystery to solve?”

“That’s the exact word I’d use for it.” In reality, Oswald would have been content to never hear of Isabella again, never know who sent her or if they wanted him or Ed or both of them dead. But part of love, he supposed, was caring about things that made your beloved happy, and Ed looked so eager, so excited, and at least now Oswald knew it wasn’t because he loved someone else. “From the bottom of my heart,” he said, “I’m so glad you’re handling this.”

“I won’t let you down,” Ed said, and for the first time the pleasure on his face dropped away. “Not this time.”

Oswald, not even thinking about it, reached out to grip the hand that was nearest to his on the covers. “You never have. I told you. Not even once.”

Ed sat up straighter, but he didn’t move his hand. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I let us get off-topic. You were telling me something.”

The wine cellar had been hours ago. His head was clear, now, but all of that bravery he’d felt earlier was gone.

“Maybe that rain check was a good idea,” he started to say, and then the damned clock burst into life again, the wooden bird chirping out a single obnoxious “ _cuckoo”_ and vanishing back into the box.

“I thought I already broke that infuriating...”

“Silly little bird,” Ed murmured, amused affection in it, and Oswald wasn’t completely sure he was talking about the clock. “There you go. You didn’t break anything after all.”

Well, not quite true. There was the lock on the door. A cab driver’s nose. Several wine bottles Olga would complain about clearing up in the morning. But none of that was important. Sometimes you needed to break things, or at least risk them being broken.

He gathered up all of his courage, sent a quick prayer for bravery in love in the unknown direction of his parents, and began: “Ed, a man comes to a crossroads in his life and he has to make a choice...”


End file.
